The Dream Was Always Paint
Photography became my career. Painting was always the dream.
Skechers, Paige Denim, and Tadashi Shoji. From shoes, premium denim, and red carpet gowns, I’ve shot it all. I remember being 14 and discovering Photoshop. I was obsessed, and that would be an understatement.
I knew how to use one filter and made everyone glow. I thought it would be cool to make any and every photo glow. It made everyone look cheap and cool at that. That got old really quickly, so I spent my time on Tutorialized.com and learned everything I could about Photoshop. I was cutting myself out of photos and changing the background to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. It looked cool! I was in the factory! Before I knew it, I was a Photoshop pro at 16.
Photoshop and all its fun editing effects from my younger years of self photoshoots.
Around that time, I also learned who David LaChapelle was and remember thinking about how amazing the colors in his photos were. So many colors and fun, absurd ideas, like a model lying on display inside a store’s meat fridge. I said, “I want to do things like this.” Meanwhile, my godfather got married and received a wedding book filled with photos from the special day. I remember looking at the 0.20 inch thick pages, thinking about how magical these photos made everything feel so alive. Everything looked and felt so special. Almost better than the wedding. That was thanks to Omar Casasola, who then taught me everything I knew about a camera. I was using a Canon Rebel XTi at 16, taking photos of everything.
This was fun. Photography was amazing, and editing in Photoshop was the cherry on top. I was able to manipulate photos and ideas into something real.
A few favorites from the years photography became my career fashion, denim, shoes, and everything in between. So many shoots, ideas, and images I’m still proud of.
Years and years of amazing work eventually got boring. Paige Denim and the team really took all the fun out of photography. Non creative marketing teams had so much to say and so much they wanted to try for the sake of looking cool in the room. It was not fun. I left Paige and took my seat with Skechers. Nine years later, after photography, retouching, and design, here we are. It’s 2026, and we are all creating AI enriched content, while the creative digital frontier has begun reshaping what art is. At least for me, that is.
I thought to myself, what can I do that’s still cool to me? Photography ran its course. I’m so good at it, but it wasn’t good enough for me.
It’s November 2025, and after multiple conversations about art with one of my best friends, I thought to myself: I should just paint. I quickly remembered being in middle school and becoming so angry that my free period was not an art class like others had. I was enrolled in the Sylvan Learning program instead because English was my second language. Do I have good grammar now? I would spend a couple of minutes during lunch or after school with an art teacher who was willing to show me a thing or two. I went to high school and, miraculously, was allowed to have an art class, of which I have NO RECOLLECTION. All I remember saying over and over was that I wanted to be an artist. An Artist was stuck in my head for life.
That month In November alone brought so much change. I bought art supplies, and they sat there in peace. Multiple trips to the art store were made only to have paints and tools just sit there. I eventually made a cool green thing from a tutorial I saw and was bored. Finally, I bought an easel, and this changed everything. It was the magic tool. Standing in front of it felt so natural for something I’d never done.
It was real magic happening in real time. I thought about what the first thing I would paint should be. I put words into sketches and ideas into formation. I completed my first piece of real art and thought to myself, “I’m an artist, and I can do anything.” It’s only been a couple of months, but I’m here now and ready to share everything I’ve been discovering and producing along the way. So come along with me. I’ll be sharing the art, the ideas behind it, the things I’m learning, and all the little discoveries and realizations that happen along the way. It only took me a decade or two, but I have arrived.
My first NO NAME piece. I call it the first, and you’ll have to read all about this one in my next post.